The Bane of Abandoned Cart Emails and Unsubscribes

Recently I received a series of abandoned cart emails from a company that I had shopped to make a purchase with then once in the cart changed my mind and decided to pursue a different source for the product I was interested in.

The reason I abandoned the cart was the shipping for the item was rather ridiculous, almost $20 and about as much as the item I was purchasing. I don’t mind paying shipping but I knew this was a rather high rate and I could get the product elsewhere for much less shipping combined. So I left and never looked back.

Then I began to get the series of abandoned cart emails “did you forget something,” “you left something in your cart,” do you still want this” etc.. This process left much to be desired and got me to thinking. This might even relate to an earlier post I made about “world class customer service” since it does apply to the difference between service (or lack of it) and world class service in my opinion as it relates to what I think went wrong in the abandoned cart emails in terms of customer service. And this was furthered when I finally decided to hit the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.

I think it should be obvious if a person abandons a cart 99.9% of the time they probably don’t want to complete the purchase and maybe ever. So I would think it would behoove the company to try and find out why. Was it price? Something wrong with the checkout process? At the least, the company should provide an easy method for the potential customer to communicate with them why they abandoned the cart, should they so desire. This could easily open up a dialogue to perhaps find and fix the problem if possible and win a new customer as well as potentially capture more customers.

This company ( major company btw) failed on all accounts. Their email did not provide an easy method for me to reply why I abandoned the cart. (Surely I could have called them or opened up a dialogue in some other way but that would require a lot of effort on my part not to mention being able to connect them with or maintain the thread of the abandoned cart email).

None of their abandoned cart emails considered that price might be a factor and thus offered a small discount coupon if I would complete the purchase. (I do know this company offers coupons for purchase all the time I just didn’t happen to have one at the time). In fact, had I received such a coupon in a subsequent abandoned cart email I probably would have completed the purchase as it would have offset the high shipping price.

In addition, when I finally got fed up with these emails and hit the unsubscribe link it simply unsubscribed me. Didn’t even ask me or give me an opportunity to explain why I was unsubscribing. So another opportunity lost by this company to provide world class customer service and another sign that their marketing was rather one-sided to some extent.